Could 2014 finally be the year that long-simmering inflation fears boil over? Wells Capital’s Jim Paulsen thinks it just might be.

“In the last five or six years we’ve been worried about nothing but deflation and weak growth,” Paulsen tells Yahoo Finance’s Breakout, “so it’s very difficult to imagine that we might get to a point where we’re worried about an overheated economy again, but I think we’ve got a shot at that (this year).”

Paulsen says a number of factors — a new dovish Federal Reserve chairman, tightening labor market, rising factory capacity utilization rate, rising commodity prices — could combine to trigger inflation fears. “If you put all those together I think that could cause people to worry about overheating or inflation,” he says. To be clear, though, Paulsen is expecting only a small pickup in inflation this year. But he thinks that slight pickup could trigger bigger fears.